Hilde Westvold

Hilde Westwold from Norway

Hilde lives with her parents far from everything. She herself tells of her life here:
"I am an only child of two magical parents and they home-schooled me, and taught me everything they knew both about magic and the world. We live far away in the country, and we're used to being self reliant and hard working."
  Her appearance is homely in every sense of the word, squat, mousegrey hair, coarse features and manners. Combined with her obvious good brains and memory and having been taught much of what the others are fighting to learn, her aptitude to corect the other apprentices with a mine of "how hard can it be" makes Hilde not generally liked by the other apprentices of her nature team or indeed by any of the other apprentices. One day, not long after the Easter fire that changed this, she tells about growing up and magic.
"It seems that Nature magic is a kind of magic needing almost no wands," Hilde began her tale. "We lived alone, far from any big, or even small cities. We had an old, decrepit car, and once a month - more frequently in Winter and early spring, my father drove to the nearest town. Ther he shopped and sent off his work - to this day I do not know what he did. He worked all winter, rising early, going for a run, and then typing away all day in a small room in the upper floor. He always kept it carefully locked, and after he retired, it was cleared, and everything in there, even the furniture, burned. I suspect som kind of intelligence or espionage. Anyway -- from early spring well into autumn we worked from dawn to dusk, tending plants, feeding our cows, poultry and rabbits, weeding fields, hoisting water from the well, picking, canning, milking, picking seeds for next year, in short making sure to suevive another winter. Father also sold some of our surplus in autumn, and brought home sugar, tea and spices and needles, fabric and such. In winter, when my father wrote, mother and I sewed, wowe baskets, made spoons and containers from wood, we also learned and studied. We had one very old wand for all three of us, It had belonged to my mother's grandmother, it was decrepit, and for every use its magic grew less. So we only used it for real emergencies. But for the growing things, and such ... mom called it blessing magic ... only our hands were needed. We held our hands cupped around a plant or a chicken that was blighted or ill, then we sang, mom and dad taught me all the songs you have been studying here as well, and mostly the plants grew true and the small ones thrived. We also dabbled in potions, but we did not know enough, and we could not find anything to study.
  You can imagine our happines when Jon and Tähti showed up one day in Spring and sung wands for my parents and promised that I could go to school here. Singing of wands seems to have been a forgotten craft until recently, and only a few magic people have travelled far enough, or been lucky enough to find a wand maker in another country."

 - - - - - -

Hilde loses her magic same as all the rest of the magic society in the Nordic countries. Instead of expanding, they had to close down. Gilvi visited all of the parents, grandparents, cousins, friends ... in short all and sundry for whom Tähti or Thora had sung wands in the past three years, making them break their wands, and cast the forgetting spell on themselves, as a preamble to the terrible summer party at Unicorn Farm (not online).

Hilde's wand is made from spruce, emitting kitchen blue sparks. She survived the loss of her magic by efficiently burying herself in her studies to become a nurse. We meet her again as a busy nurse and grandmother in Birch Manor.